Martha Marcy May Marlene, the debut of writer-director Sean Durkin, opens with an escape: A young, obviously troubled woman named Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) flees the odd Catskills farm community where she lives, dashes through the forest and outruns her pursuers.

Martha Marcy May Marlene, the debut of writer-director Sean Durkin, opens with an escape: A young, obviously troubled woman named Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) flees the odd Catskills farm community where she lives, dashes through the forest and outruns her pursuers.

Some things, though, a person can’t run away from so easily.

Martha eventually finds a pay phone and calls her older sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who hasn’t seen Martha in two years. She offers to pick her up.

Martha moves into her sister’s Connecticut lakeside summer home, where Lucy is vacationing with her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy). Almost immediately upon arriving, Martha begins to display worrisome behavior: stripping naked in front of the couple to go for a swim, walking in on them while they’re having sex and crawling into their bed as if they were watching television, asking her sister grandly inappropriate questions and making rude observations about the couple’s lifestyle.

And that’s just the start.

One of the ingenious aspects of Martha Marcy May Marlene is how precisely the film is constructed, constantly drawing us in closer while making them dread what’s coming. Bit by bit, Durkin cuts away to the past to show us where Martha was and why she ran away.

The more we learn about Martha’s life on the farm — a strange, seemingly idyllic cult populated exclusively by young adults and children, and ruled by Patrick (a fantastic John Hawkes), who is prone to Mansonesque observations such as “Death is pure love” — the more we understand her profound emotional and psychological damage.

As the extent of Patrick’s predatory evil is revealed, the more we fear that Martha will never recover.

Durkin, who won the director award at Sundance in January, has found the perfect actress in Olsen, the younger sister of twins Mary-Kate and Ashley, to portray Martha’s deeply fragmented psyche.

The more we come to understand this enigmatic, blank-faced woman, whose mind always seems to be elsewhere, the more we see the world through her paranoid, confused eyes.

When Martha starts to suspect cult members might have tracked her down, we’re just as scared as she is by the mere sound of pine cones falling on the roof.

Martha Marcy May Marlene gradually places us inside the mind of a woman who might be insane, and — in its audacious, terrifying final scene — the movie traps us there in perpetuity, refusing to provide us with a way out.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.